Friday, June 3, 2011

Last week when I was in Prague I had the oppurtunity to catch up with Alexis-Moussine Pouchkine (@alexismp). While there Alexis recorded an interview with me about EclipseLink and we both spoke at the Java Developer Conference in Brno.

The developer conference was my first opportunity to present a talk on the work we have been doing within the EclipseLink project to address development of applications for the cloud. More specifically we have been busy working on some features which I think will be very interesting to all Java EE developers using JPA. These include:

@Multitenant: Support for configuring entities which have data from different tenants stored in the same table. EclipseLink will automatically apply additional criteria on all queries to only read and modify the rows for your current tenant.

Extensible Entities with Virtual Attributes (@VirtualAccessMethods): Allow for attributes to be mapped to database flex columns on the fly. This includes both JPA and JAXB mappings/bindings as well as tenant specific extensions.

MetadataSource: Allow for your XML specified JPA mappings or JAXB bindings to be dynamically loaded and used by your application from an external source. This allows you to customize your application on-the-fly from an external source.

In my presentation I did a demo of my new MySports demo application which I am busy wrapping up and documenting for the Eclipse Indigo release (June 22). This application shows off the new features with a multitenant JSF application which includes dynamic JSF rendering of extended attributes using the JPA 2.0 metamodel. The tenant configuration and provisioning is done using an admin application which uses REST and EclipseLink MOXy's binding support.

It should be a busy month wrapping up all of the necessary documentation and examples for the Indigo release so that EclipseLink